State and green crimes related to water pollution and ecological disorganization: water pollution from publicly owned treatment works (POTW) facilities across US states

Green criminologists often refer to water pollution as an example of a green crime, but have yet to produce much research on this subject. The current article addresses the need for green criminological analyses of water pollution problems, and draws attention to an overlooked issue: water pollution emissions from state owned public water treatment facilities or POTWs. Legally, POTWs may emit certain quantities and kinds of pollutants to waterways following treatment. This does not mean, however, that those emissions have no adverse ecological or public health impacts, or that those emissions cannot also be employed as examples of green crimes or green-state crimes. Indeed, from the perspective of environmental sociology and ecological Marxism, those emissions generate ecological disorganization. Moreover, POTW emissions contain numerous pollutants that generate different forms of ecological disorganization. The current study uses POTW emissions data drawn from the US EPA’s Discharge Monitoring Report system for 2014 to illustrate the extent of pollution emitted by POTWs in and across US states as one dimension of ecological disorganization. To contextualize the meaning of those data, we review US water pollution regulations, review the health and ecological impacts of chemicals emitted by POTWs, and situate those emissions within green criminological discussions of green crime and green-state crimes

Smartphone-based User Location Tracking in Indoor Environment

International audienceThis paper introduces our work in the framework of Track 3 of the IPIN 2016 Indoor Localization Competition, which addresses the smartphone-based tracking problem in an offline manner.Our approach splits the path-reconstruction into several smaller tasks, including building identification, floor identification, user direction and speed inference.For each task, a specific set of data from the provided log data is used.Evaluation is carried out using a cross validation scheme.To produce the robustness again noisy data, we combine several approaches into one on the basis of their testing results.By testing on the provided training data, we have a good accuracy on building and floor identification. For the task of tracking the user's position within the floor, the result is 10m at 3rd-quarter distance error after 3 minutes of walking

Towards improved organisational decision-making - a method and tool-chain

Modern enterprises are large complex systems operating in an increasingly dynamic environment and are tasked to meet organisational goals by adopting suitable course of actions or means. This calls for deep understanding of the enterprise, the operating environment, and the change drivers reactive as well as proactive. Traditionally, enterprises have been relying on human experts to perform these activities. However, the sole reliance on humans for decision making is increasingly unviable given the large size of modern enterprises, fast dynamics, and the prohibitively high cost of incorrect decisions. To address this challenge, we propose a method that leverages existing enterprise modelling (EM) tools to improve the agility of organisational decision-making as well as reducing the analysis burden on human experts. The proposed method artifact employs a design science research methodology and the method is validated using a realistic industrial case to bring out its strengths as well as limitations

Price discrimination through communication

We study a seller's optimal mechanism for maximizing revenue when the buyer may present evidence relevant to the buyer's value, or when different types of buyer have a differential ability to communicate. We introduce a dynamic bargaining protocol in which the buyer first makes a sequence of concessions in a cheap talk phase, and then at a time determined by the seller, the buyer presents evidence to support his previous assertions, and then the seller makes a take-it-or-leave-it offer. Our main result is that the optimal mechanism can be implemented as a sequential equilibrium of our dynamic bargaining protocol. Unlike the optimal mechanism to which the seller can commit, the equilibrium of the bargaining protocol also provides incentives for the seller to behave as required. We thereby provide a natural procedure whereby the seller can optimally price discriminate on the basis of the buyer's evidence

Three Essays in Volatility

For a typical firm, idiosyncratic volatility is as sensitive to the relative value of assets in place as to growth options. However, for firms dominated by assets in place (growth options), idiosyncratic volatility is more sensitive to the relative value of assets in place (growth options). Binding irreversibility constraint (uncertainty) makes the effect of assets in place (growth options) more pronounced. The institutional ownership in China’s (the U.S.) stock market is positively (negatively) related to idiosyncratic volatility. Our dynamic tests show two-way Granger-causality between institutional ownership and idiosyncratic volatility in the U.S. and one-way Granger-causality in China. It indicates that institutional investors behave differently in the U.S. and China. Stock characteristics are important factors which affect idiosyncratic volatility associated with institutional holding. Our findings are robust to controlling for the financial crisis period, proportions of institutional ownership, long-term and short-term institutional ownership, and different types of institutional investors. Using Sims\u27 two-sided regression approach, we show that 1) there is bidirectional causality between institutional ownership and stock return volatility and 2) not accounting for the feedback effects from institutional ownership to return volatility yields the opposite institutional preferences on volatility. Subsequent analyses reveal that (surprisingly) prudence plays a role in institutions\u27 preference on return volatility. But we fail to find support for the informational advantage argument in the literature. Lastly, we find weak evidence in the importance of growth opportunities in institutions\u27 preferences on volatility

Institutional Reform and Depositors' Portfolio Choice - Evidence from Censored Quantile Regressions

In this paper we study the effect of institutional reform on the decision to hold risky assets at the extensive and the intensive margin. We therefore make use of the natural experiment of German Division and Reunification and, based on savings bank customer data from German savings banks, study whether the customers of East German banks differ from their West German counterparts. While we find only slight differences in the decision to hold risky assets at the extensive margin, the differences turn out to be much larger at the intensive margin. Moreover, the latter effects turn out to be quite persistent even in the age group of individuals which were too young at the time of German Reunification to have collected financial experiences in one of the previously existing systems. Our results support the view that reforms allowing individuals to get easy access to financial markets quite quickly result in increasing market participation. However, the degree and sort of risk, individuals are willing to bear, seems to change only slowly as the portfolios of East and West German savings bank customers still differ considerably 15 years after German Reunification. We attribute this finding to the only slowly changing informal institutions

Evaluating perceptual maps of asymmetries for gait symmetry quantification and pathology detection

Le mouvement de la marche est un processus essentiel de l'activité humaine et aussi le résultat de nombreuses interactions collaboratives entre les systèmes neurologiques, articulaires et musculo-squelettiques fonctionnant ensemble efficacement. Ceci explique pourquoi une analyse de la marche est aujourd'hui de plus en plus utilisée pour le diagnostic (et aussi la prévention) de différents types de maladies (neurologiques, musculaires, orthopédique, etc.). Ce rapport présente une nouvelle méthode pour visualiser rapidement les différentes parties du corps humain liées à une possible asymétrie (temporellement invariante par translation) existant dans la démarche d'un patient pour une possible utilisation clinique quotidienne. L'objectif est de fournir une méthode à la fois facile et peu dispendieuse permettant la mesure et l'affichage visuel, d'une manière intuitive et perceptive, des différentes parties asymétriques d'une démarche. La méthode proposée repose sur l'utilisation d'un capteur de profondeur peu dispendieux (la Kinect) qui est très bien adaptée pour un diagnostique rapide effectué dans de petites salles médicales car ce capteur est d'une part facile à installer et ne nécessitant aucun marqueur. L'algorithme que nous allons présenter est basé sur le fait que la marche saine possède des propriétés de symétrie (relativement à une invariance temporelle) dans le plan coronal.The gait movement is an essential process of the human activity and also the result of coordinated effort between the neurological, articular and musculoskeletal systems. This motivates why gait analysis is important and also increasingly used nowadays for the (possible early) diagnosis of many different types (neurological, muscular, orthopedic, etc.) of diseases. This paper introduces a novel method to quickly visualize the different parts of the body related to an asymmetric movement in the human gait of a patient for daily clinical. The goal is to provide a cheap and easy-to-use method to measure the gait asymmetry and display results in a perceptually relevant manner. This method relies on an affordable consumer depth sensor, the Kinect. The Kinect was chosen because this device is amenable for use in small, confined area, like a living room. Also, since it is marker-less, it provides a fast non-invasive diagnostic. The algorithm we are going to introduce relies on the fact that a healthy walk has (temporally shift-invariant) symmetry properties in the coronal plane

Three Pillars of Historical Wisdom: Atomization, Data Building and Flexibility: On historical databases for research

Rapport interne à l'usage des utilisateurs de la base de données FichozA short treatise on how to build an efficient, open and flexible database system for historical research. In other words, how to build an efficient tool for the management of information while wholly preserving the indefinition of basic data and direct availability for a variety of users belonging to a same field, but pursuing different purposes. With a final reference to Fichoz database.Bref traité sur comment construire un système de bases de données efficace pour la recherche historique. En d'autres termes, comment construire un outil efficace pour le traitement de l'information, qui préserve intégralement à la fois l'indéfinition des données de départ tout en étant immédiatement disponibles pour une communauté d'utilisateurs qui, bien que relevant du même champ, poursuivent chacun des stratégies et des buts de recherche différents. Avec une référence finale à la base de données Fichoz